Lingua Franca
Speech-enabled voice response systems boost customer service while propping up the bottom line.
By Mary Petrosky
Transportation services company Landstar System Inc. implemented its first interactive voice response (IVR) system six years ago, a Touch-Tone system meant to enable independent truck drivers to check in with the company and report their location. Such timely information flow is crucial to Jacksonville, Fla.-based Landstar, whose 1,000 independent agents coordinate thousands of truck owner/ operators to deliver customer shipments across North America. But the owner/operators, also known as business capacity owners (BCOs), used the IVR system only sporadically. That was because keying in the many required tracking numbers and accurate city and state information was cumbersome, if not nearly impossible.
Speech-enabled IVR is streamlining communication between Landstar and truck owner/operators, says CIO Larry Thomas. This year, Landstar began piloting a speech-enabled version of the check-in system in hopes of getting more BCOs on board. "Usage has already gone up significantly," says Larry Thomas, Landstar's CIO. Now the company has extended the check-in system to allow BCOs to also request payment advances, eliminating the need for the call center to field these requests.
Not long ago, only large companies could afford the proprietary systems and outside expertise needed to reap the benefits of such IVR systems. Landstar's experience demonstrates how advances in speech technology, coupled with easy-to-use development tools and off-the-shelf applications, are bringing the benefits of speech enabled IVR within the reach of small and medium-sized businesses.
Prime-time Benefits
"Speech has been ready for prime time since 2001," says Art Schoeller, senior analyst at The Yankee Group consultancy, based in Boston. "One of the big trends in the industry right now is the availability of packaged applications," including horizontal applications such as automated attendants and vertical applications such as bank-by-phone, he notes.
IVR systems have been around for more than a decade, enabling users to interact with databases via telephone. The systems generally follow a recorded script and talk users through a transaction. In the earliest systems, as with many still in use today, the phone's Touch-Tone keys are the user interface, used for everything from refilling a prescription to ordering ball game tickets. In many cases, however, the transactions are laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone.
In the past few years, speech-recognition technology has been used to provide a more natural user interface to IVR systems. "Studies from research firms such as Giga Information Group have shown that speech technology increases the use of automated systems over Touch-Tone systems by up to 50%," notes James Mastan, director of marketing for Microsoft Speech Server.
Higher usage of an IVR system translates to direct dollar savings by reducing the number of human operators needed to handle such calls. Mastan notes that a typical customer service call costs between $5 and $10, compared with 30 cents for a fully automated call, such as a bank balance inquiry.
Offloading repetitive, "no brainer" calls from a call center frees up agents to handle more complex customer calls and opens the door for upselling those customers, Mastan adds. And streamlining customer access to information not only increases customer satisfaction and customer retention, it can also boost employee productivity and retention.
"The business case for speech is generally based on offloading live agents, so the payback period is less than a year, often six months," notes Yankee Group's Schoeller. "However, you have to balance the cost savings with customer satisfaction."
Improving Customer Communication
Striking that balance is key for Seattle-based Grange Insurance Group, which offers property and casualty insurance. The company's customer service department currently handles about 500 calls a day, most of them billing inquiries. In April, Grange began piloting its Around the Clock Billing Inquiry Application, the company's first IVR application, says Ryan Thorsness, business liaison for Grange.
This speech-enabled application, built on Microsoft Speech Server, lets customers, insurance agents, and mortgage bankers access policy and payment information 24/7, rather than being restricted to the weekday call center hours.
Although Grange expects the system to reduce the workload on its customer service reps, a key driver for the application was to improve communication with customers and agents, thus retaining customers and attracting high-quality agents, Thorsness says. The company is already looking to deploy other speech-based IVR applications, such as online payment and outbound, text-to-speech applications. For example, an outbound-oriented application could notify agents of changes in claim office phone numbers or provide instructions on how to proceed with claims in case of a natural disaster.
Both Mastan and Schoeller agree that speech enables IVR applications that weren't possible with Touch-Tone systems. For example, stock quotes and trading, airline reservation systems, sales force automation–even a change of address–are too complex for a Touch-Tone system.
Landstar is certainly sold on the idea of speech-enabled IVR. In addition to its check-in application, Landstar last year deployed another IVR application that exploits text-to-speech capabilities. Agents use Landstar's Web-based application to identify BCOs that meet the criteria to move specific shipments based on equipment, location, and so on. Once the agent selects the BCOs he or she wants to contact, the application calls them and conveys the job information. Thomas notes that this application has very high usage–upwards of 9,000 messages per day–and has significantly streamlined communication between agents and BCOs.
More recently the company began piloting a third speech-enabled IVR application, built on Microsoft Speech Server, that's designed to boost the number of trucks available for service. Thomas notes that 7% to 10% of the fleet is on hold on any given day because inspections, certifications, or medical checkups are due. BCOs can contact the Compliance Information Assistant for driver and equipment compliance status and request any forms they need. Thomas hopes the system will reduce the number of trucks on hold by 20%, moving to 30% as more features are added. In particular, he'd like to enhance the system to initiate outbound calls.
"We're dealing with a truly mobile workforce," Thomas notes. "The IVR technology of today has given us a means to deliver self-service. It also provides us with information, and in turn lets us provide them with information; that just wasn't possible in the past."
